Chef's Reach: Beyond the Kitchen for Home & Professional Cooking

We are in the midst of deep upheaval in American cooking. The Food Network, the explosion of cookbook publishing, the overnight blossoming of the culinary travel genre, and the celebrity chef phenomenon all mark our new interest in the culture of restaurant food, if not in food per se. The extent of this food-culture is startling. No longer is French cooking the domain of a few big-city Europeanized gourmands. It's everywhere. Heck, even some of the ten-year-old girls on the soccer team I coach spend water breaks yacking about their favorite food shows. My nine-year-old, when I asked what she wanted for supper recently, answered "Grand Aioli". It's downright nutty.So we should gratefully welcome cook/food-writer Michael Ruhlman's excellent new attempt to make sense of it all. He is almost uniquely situated in the celebrity-food world to give us a clear snapshot of what's going on. This book is a series of vignettes of the hectic lives and workplaces of an impressive list of chefs and food-show stars. Thomas Keller, Anthony Bourdain, Wolfgang Puck...even no-brow pom-pom girl Rachel Ray, among several others. Ruhlman's question to them is: what is your role? Haven't you left the kitchen now that you're on TV and being interviewed and promoting your books and traveling from coast to coast to open new restaurants? The answers are fascinating, and reveal more about the business of being a culinary star than any other book I've read. And what a strange, kinetic, exhausting, adrenalized world it is. I felt exhausted just reading about Thomas Keller's schedule.If you're curious about the explosion of the food culture, this is a great primer. It's well-written, anecdotal, entertaining, and riveting. I highly recommend it as summer reading whether you love food or simply love watching it on TV.